I tried to make a collection of all the smallest and lowest-period guns for all non-standard spaceships. If anyone knows of guns I missed, or optimizations to the guns already in the collection, notify me.

gmc_nxtman wrote:I tried to make a collection of all the smallest and lowest-period guns for all non-standard spaceships. If anyone knows of guns I missed, or optimizations to the guns already in the collection, notify me.

Is there a size limit? There exist guns for both the parallel HBK and for the Gemini.

What do you do with ill crystallographers? Take them to the mono-clinic!

calcyman wrote:Is there a size limit? There exist guns for both the parallel HBK and for the Gemini.

There's also a gun for one of the Demonoids, which has the dubious distinction of being the only spaceship gun that was completed before its spaceship. The very first 0hd Demonoid was constructed by the gun.

To make this work, the yellow sparks and potentially some other things would have to be replaced with something else that either turns the right hand red cells on in gen 3, or the left hand red cells on in gen 4,

gmc_nxtman wrote:I tried to make a collection of all the smallest and lowest-period guns for all non-standard spaceships. If anyone knows of guns I missed, or optimizations to the guns already in the collection, notify me.

-- Yikes, those messages have three-digit post numbers. Haven't seen that in a while.

There seem to be several more spaceships-with-recipes on that thread that could easily be turned into guns, and maybe there are a few more actually constructed guns out there, reachable from the Stable Signal Converters thread or elsewhere? I did just a quick spot check, but couldn't immediately think of any missing guns besides the Big A.

gmc_nxtman wrote:I tried to make a collection of all the smallest and lowest-period guns for all non-standard spaceships. If anyone knows of guns I missed, or optimizations to the guns already in the collection, notify me.

The collision is much faster (just 19 ticks from the first interaction to get a clear loafer). However, it does not help for a faster gun as the loafer is too slow, but maybe it helps for finding the 7G glider synthesis.

2718281828 wrote:I found another 8G glider synthesis for the loafer:...The collision is much faster (just 19 ticks from the first interaction to get a clear loafer). However, it does not help for a faster gun as the loafer is too slow, but maybe it helps for finding the 7G glider synthesis.

Nice! Yeah, looks like repeat time of 154, same as the original. Having only three salvos makes it pretty easy to build a couple of 10-glider variant recipes with only two salvos each -- repeat time 244 and 249:

That just gets us back as far as Stephen Silver's pattern collection, though. Circumstantial evidence from old emails talking about reductions in the gun using "warped eater2s" seems to point to Dietrich Leithner as the original creator of the gun. Sometime around 1998 those spaceships started to be called "Coe ships" instead of "Coe-ships", which threw off my searches for a while -- haven't managed to dig up an original source or date yet.

That just gets us back as far as Stephen Silver's pattern collection, though. Circumstantial evidence from old emails talking about reductions in the gun using "warped eater2s" seems to point to Dietrich Leithner as the original creator of the gun. Sometime around 1998 those spaceships started to be called "Coe ships" instead of "Coe-ships", which threw off my searches for a while -- haven't managed to dig up an original source or date yet.

Thanks, Dave. With this information I was able to find that the gun was originally built by Dieter Leithner on 25 Nov 1995 and improved to the form linked above on 16 Nov 1996.

The base 25P3H1V0.2 ship which supports the branches has a nice spark at the back. The wasp is another small c/3 ship with a back spark which can also support the branches. Unfortunately, neither of these ships has a synthesis, and the two other c/3 ships which have been synthesised cannot support the branches. Even if the brain is finally synthesised, that also won't work.

So forgetting the base ship for now, the arms are rather simple. Can anyone find a reaction to extend an arm to make bigger spaceships? The fact the the ends are somewhat self-repairing might help.

A much harder challenge is to find a reaction to start another branch under an existing one. I think that there is no solution to that.